The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Tariffs, Ukraine and Trump with Nick Gillespie

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

Nick Gillespie is a libertarian, the Editor at Large of Reason Magazine and host of the podcast, Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.

Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. I'm Perrielle, the producer of the show. I'm here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar. And we have a very special guest, recurring guest, Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of free minds and free markets. I like being recurring. I feel like herpes. Well, we like you a little bit more than we like herpes. Well, you know, we all have herpes, right? Dormant. Like if you had chicken pox or something. Right.

The herpes virus. Or a lot of unprotected sex, of course. Never. I've never. And he is also the host of The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Thank you. Welcome to our show. I will, if I can, just start off out of the gate plugging my own show. I just released a great episode. It comes out on Wednesdays, so whenever this comes out, but with the novelist Lee Stein and Julius Toronto talking about whether or not we can do satire anymore in America. Not because we're not allowed to,

but because things are just so fucking crazy. Truth is stranger than satire. Yeah, and there's a famous essay by Philip Roth in commentary in 1961 where he's like, you know, he was talking about like Charles Van Doren, the Columbia professor who cheated on the game show 21 that got made into the movie Quiz Show and stuff. And he's like, you know, you just can't keep up with this kind of crazy reality.

And it's like Philip Roth, you had no idea what America was going to look like 60 years later. Periel is blushing because she almost slept with Philip Roth. Oh, really? What happened? It's a long story. You can read about it. I don't want to take up the episode, but it's a chapter in my last book.

Oh, really? Okay, that's great. You know, the woman who wrote Asymmetry got like a National Book Award out of sleeping with Philip Roth. Well, I was trying to get a National Book Award by sleeping with him, but it didn't quite work out that way. How could you not? It's when he found out you were Jewish.

He's like, okay, I'm out. Yeah, he had no idea she was Jewish. He went back to pounding liver. I think it was actually when she started talking. That's not true. Some people actually enjoy my company to talk to me. So when you sat down, you told me we were just chatting about the local New York elections. Anthony Weiner is running to be my local city council.

He's not yours. Isn't that the East Village? The district runs all the way here. Yeah, I was on Mike Peska's podcast with him. And I hate to sound like we're in the old tonight show or something some crappy hollywood circle jerk but uh yeah weiner um you know what i think weiner is pretty sociopathic uh which is not necessarily bad in a politician uh but when i was on like the first thing he did out of the gate is like you

knucklehead like he was you, you know, negging me. And Anthony Weiner is a kind of pure, you know, gain-of-function version of a New Yorker, where even if you agree with him, he just has to attack you. Gain-of-function version, that's right. He's a horrible, you know, has a horrible personal manner,

and I think he's probably won his last election. Did you think that before you met him in person? You know what? I had followed him on TV back when he was a congressman, and all the Breitbart stuff and all of that stuff was coming out. And he had always struck me on gab shows, and I think he would go on Fox as well as like CNN or MSNBC. And what I liked about him is that he was willing to argue with people, which is good, you know, and he has a definite point of view, and he's not a super identity politics progressive.

No, he's not. Which is good. But he is a noxious kind of human being, I think. And he raises a lot of interesting questions. In the context of the show we were talking, he brought up the fact that in the New York mayor's race, there's at least three of the candidates, Scott Stringer, Eric Adams, and Andrew Cuomo, all either have sexual assault charges or impropriety charges against them that were either, you know, taken seriously or not.

And he pointed out, which is a kind of clever move, you know, that he paid his time, literally. He did hard time, by the way. So just, you know, I've met Anthony Weiner. I didn't know him until, I don't know, six months ago. When you picked up your daughter's cell phone? No, no, no. No, when he contacted me because he's running for office here, and I met with him, and I rather liked him.

I mean, this kind of pugnacious personality that you're describing, I enjoyed that. I likened him in a post somewhere after this event. He's like the burp that you have after eating a dishwater dog on the sidewalk. Oh my God, you're harsh. No, I mean, that's just who he is and he doesn't hold up. You know what's interesting? Because I would love to talk about the New York City mayor's race a little bit, but in New York, ideology should be less important, the more local the race, right? And one of the things that's frustrating about somebody like Weiner, who recognizes that the Democrats have fallen out of favor, and that may only be for a couple

more months, really, until the midterms. And, you know, the Republicans nationally are doing everything they can to lose whatever advantages they have. But, you know, when, you know, he'll be like, yeah, we have to fix things, we have to change things. And then it's like, okay, well, you know, what should we do about Social Security? Absolutely nothing. Medicare, nothing. You know, everything is, we shouldn't do anything other than tax rich people more and give more stuff to more people. And to me, that is unbelievably frustrating to be in those conversations where we went from in 2019 at the federal level spending $4.4 trillion to now we're going to spend $7.2 trillion this year under a conservative Republican who's dozing the government and stuff like that. And there's just something fucked up. If you can't figure out how do you get back close, if not below $4.4 trillion, which at the time was

a record amount of money that was being spent. So let me just say, you know, it's not my place to tell a guest what they, you know, shouldn't say about even people that I have friendships with. I'm not a good friend of Anthony Weiner, but we know each other, and the things that he got in trouble for are quite serious. And I told him that on the show here. And I've had to process it, but he

did his time. He did hard time, not minimum security time. He did two years, and then afterward worked at a job that was only for ex-cons. And he's been very forthright about it. And I do, one part of me says, yes, people have done their time. That should be the end of it. Another part of me can't be dishonest.

And we know that certain crimes which are based on kind of personal pathologies are not just, you know, they can recur. But he said he goes for regular counseling and he calls himself an addict. And to the extent that you, however you'd want somebody like him to behave, I think he's doing that. And so I- I agree with that.

And he spoke on this show about being in recovery and whatnot, and he seems to take it seriously. Yeah, he does take it seriously. And by the way, one thing you were talking about, we assume that sex crimes are categorically different than other crimes. There is actually very little criminological or sociological data that actually backs that up. It's considered true by people people like Thomas Saas, the great psychiatrist who was a critic of psychiatry and the medicalization of everyday life,

he was a longtime contributing editor to Reason, wrote a lot about that, as did others. And it turns out that that's actually not true, which should be a relief to people. And, you know, none of this means you don't prosecute sex crimes, you know, rapidly and effectively and all of that but you know if he's in if he's taking you know recovery seriously and all of that there's no reason to worry about him with that I mean the harder questions come like what

do you what do you do in in New York City what are you know what are the pressing issues and how do you fix them? Because we have an insane amount of political gridlock in this city that I call home, that I was born in, and then I lived in and worked in and then moved away from and came back to. And it's frustrating. And when you look at the mayor's race, it's just kind of like, holy cow, this is not good. So Wiener comes across in this atmosphere. He comes across as a right-of-center New York candidate. And as a business owner, I want to support the most right-wing local candidate that there is. When you say right-wing, you mean somebody who's pro-business?

Somebody who's pro-business, yeah. Not the most right wing. Well, maybe not most right wing on a national election, but in terms of what's realistic in a New York City election, to be in the running, he is the most right wing guy we're going to get. Is he going to win? I don't think there's any really credible polling, but he's out there apparently every day shaking hands, whatever

it is. People are forgiving. I've spoken to people and I spoke to Tiana over here and just people, waitresses who work for me and stuff like that, and they were like, yeah, I could vote for a guy, even though they knew what happened, which was interesting to me.

And so maybe he will win. Name recognition in a local election is very, very important. And he is a winning. People like him. You know, they do like him. Yeah, I'm not sure of that. Nick doesn't. Yeah, well, you know why?

Because that kind of in-your-face, like, you know, right out of the box, he's like, you know, somebody's electrocuting him and he's in your face i don't know if people like that i mean i don't like it particularly and i think i have a thicker skin than a lot of people but you know ultimately what it comes down to is like okay what are you going to do about the rats and the garbage and how are you going to make it easier for more you this gets complicated very quickly especially in a place that's like the Greenwich Village or East Village or whatever. When you say, how do we make it easier for people to live here? How do we make rents cheaper? And then people are like pissed off because I don't want anybody else

living here. I just came back from a trip to Austin, Texas, where Reason Magazine, where I work, had an annual donor event. We have them in different cities every year, and this time it was in Austin. And before that, with a couple of colleagues, we were doing a documentary about how Austin has had massive growth, really over the past 50 years, but since COVID. Like a lot of people, when the lockdown started, they moved to Austin, rents went up, and then miracle of miracles, the city council and Texas at the state level, and there's county, you know, government, they all were like, okay, we're going to make it easier for developers to build housing. And rents

now are lower than they were at the, you know, right after COVID when people started pouring into the city. and it was amazing like you can imagine this it's like new yorkers when you go to people in a city and you're saying like you know the you know what's the secret here runs around down and it's like well you know nick it's like this and this is left-wingers and right-wingers and libertarians and you know left-wing anarchists and homeless people, everybody there seems to be on amphetamines. The homeless people are really...

In New York, yeah, they're kind of low-key and fentanyl, and in Texas, they are just really on a lot of uppers. But every one of them just said, Nick, sit down because this is kind of complicated, but it's like if there's more demand for housing and then you build more housing, the prices go down. And I was like, wow, that – you know, it is amazing that like no other city, seriously, like no other big city has thought of that. So what do you make of this whole new Ezra Klein movement to – that – like it's like they discovered the most elementary rules. Yeah, well, it is, you know, part of me is like, you know, I love this stuff. And I loved it,

you know, even more when I read it in Reason 50 years ago, or 25 years ago, or 20 years ago, but more, you know, just, you know, without any reservations or anything, I think it is great to see people who identify as progressive saying, you know, the, you know, what we're talking about here constantly are problems in supply rather than demand. And to say, instead of being like, oh, well, you know, what we got to do is like, we have to make it so people, you know, people don't want as much housing, people don't want as much education because it's too expensive. And instead of focusing on those old things and trying to distribute things through the government, they're saying, okay, we need to think about supply.

How do you maximize and maximize supply of everything? I think that's great. So I like that they're focused on this and that they're talking about this. I'm uncomfortable. Their solutions tend to be too top-down for me. Like what? It's just that the government is going to be very involved with saying, okay, you can build this, but not this. And these people get first crack. It's just things like that. I mean, we need to become Promethean again. I think we need to be stealing fire from the gods

within politics and outside of politics. We just need to become less governable and let things go. I agree with you. I just said that to Corinne in the last hour. I said, it used to be the Wild West, and it was good. Yeah. I mean, and rules are there. I didn. I just said that to Corinne in the last hour. I said, it used to be the Wild West, and it was good. Yeah. I mean, and it's, you know, rules are there. I didn't say Promethean, but same idea.

Okay. No, actually, Wild West is better, right? Like, who am I trying to impress? And, yeah, you know, we need, one of the things that's fascinating in Austin is that, you know, there's the city of Austin, and then it's within Travis County and there's a bunch of other counties around there. But in most of these places in unincorporated areas, you can basically do whatever you want. And so like there's a big chunk of land and a developer can go and as long as they get certain basic permits and they build the infrastructure,

you know, the roads going in and out and the sewers and the water and all of that, like they can do what they want. And God, that's like kind of amazing. And in Texas, I've been thinking about this a lot because I lived in Texas in the 90s. I lived in the prison town in Texas, Huntsville, where the death chamber is. And it was, you know, a weird- Gary Gilmore was- No, no, he was out in Utah. Utah, right. Yeah. He might've killed people in Texas. I think I confused him. He was a very good driver.

I loved those kind of serial killers who read on the road, because like Ted Bundy, he was in Florida and Washington State. It's like they really put a lot of miles on. But in Texas, unlike places like California, where I've lived, and Florida, where I've visited a fair amount, and I guess Florida is a different story, or New York, where I live, like in Texas, they're like, you know what, we got a lot of land. And like the buildings can never reach up to blot out the sun. So it's like, let's just start building more, bigger, higher, taller. And that's kind of exciting. I mean, you know, I'm a second generation born in America or third generation, second generation, whatever that is. And like the whole reason, you know, I kept hearing about why people came here was because you could build stuff that you couldn't do in like old Europe, you know. And in New York, I mean, you know, the way my parents talked about New York in the, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s, especially, you could you could really, you know, take big swings and like build stuff out and just do what you wanted.

And if you couldn't do it in New York, then you would go west and do it. And, you know, California is it's it's an unbelievable state where it's like you can't really do anything. I was just reading a story today. You know, the Pacific Palisades fire. Yeah. And the mayor, Karen Bass, who is ridiculous, and Gavin Newsom, you know, they both were like, okay, you know what we're going to do now that this whole part of Southern California burned down?

We're going to suspend all of the normal bullshit that we require. Since then, they've only approved four permits in Pacific Palisades for houses. And it's like, okay, well, you're done. People are going to move to Texas where in the time, you know, they leave LA and drive to Austin, like there'll be a complex, you know, that has like 50 apartment, you know, apartments in it or something. They talk about reforming things and there is part of this, it is when Elon Musk has that chainsaw. I'm not a fan at all. I know you're not either and I want to talk about

how the Trump administration has been behaving itself. But yeah, the chainsaw is not a bad metaphor. It's not a bad image for what needs to be done. Yeah, he kind of got that from Javier Millay, the Argentine president. Who you're a fan of. Yeah, yeah, I like a lot so far.

I mean, I don't, you know, I have to admit I don't fully understand the intricacies of Argentine politics. You don't? No, I know. I've been faking it all these years. But, you you know he came around with a chainsaw and you know and i think in the past uh people like uh ran paul might have shot did he use a chainsaw or like a wood chipper i don't know or he might have shot you know like regulations like a stack of regulations things like that but yeah i mean part of it is you can

spend your whole life trying to fix things in the place you are, or you can like light out for the territory and build on a kind of blank landscape. And I don't know. Do you think that Ezra Klein and all these Democrats and liberals who have found the new religion, do you think that would have happened if Trump hadn't won? Yeah, I do in this sense that Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson of The Atlantic had been working on this kind of material along with somebody like Matt Iglesias, who I believe actually grew up in the village. But, you know, they have, you know, they've been working towards these ideas for a while. So, you know, that's good. And I mean, to me, the in a lot of ways, I mean, I'm a hardcore libertarian reasons. You know, we're the magazine of free minds and free markets.

We like civil liberties and economic liberties and think they're all together. You know, they're all part of the same thing. And so we like the idea of just if you can dream it, you can do it, as long as you're not objectively hurting somebody else or stealing from them within very large parameters. And I think it's good to see people that identify as being either liberal or leftist starting to come to those conclusions. The guy who is now the president of The Nation, one of the oldest magazines in the country,

and a very left-wing magazine, Bhaskar Sankara, he founded Jacobin, a socialist magazine. And he's an ideological character, but he even calls himself a market socialist. So, you know, what he wants is a society that is fairer and more kind of egalitarian. But even he will say, you know, in a lot of most cases, the way you get there is through markets

and making sure people can participate in them. So tell our, since it's related to this, tell our audience who doesn't understand it, because it is complicated, why are tariffs such a bad idea? Yeah. I'm presuming you think they're bad. Yeah, I do.

The worst. I don't know if they're the worst, but— No redeeming. No redeeming. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. There's really no social or cultural or scientific redeeming value? What is the for porn, where it's like the test for porn, if, you know, a work of art has no,

no, it has like no artistic or social or cultural meaning. Yeah, yeah, it only appeals to prurient interest. Yeah, I mean, tariffs, the thing to understand about tariffs is that they are a tax that is, you know, that is not levied on the producer, the exporter, you know, the guy in China who's sending stuff here. It is a tax that is levied on the importer of that, which then ends up being passed on to the consumer. So it raises our prices. Now, let me just stop you there because now, does 100% of that price get passed along or does the guy in China lower his prices?

Sometimes. It all varies, right? And it varies on a lot of things, but it's China will, you know, will come up with a better way to produce stuff. So he can, you know, he's got a fatter profit margin that the tariff eats into because he's got to lower his price to get it in. So it costs less in America. Sometimes it's the importer will eat some of the costs. But ultimately, it ends up, you know, it ends up increasing prices. and those are mostly borne by the consumer. I mean, you could imagine. high enough and people know they're high enough and they're going to be around for a while, then the argument is that, well, we'll start producing these things that we were going

to import because it's cheaper. That is not nearly often the case. And it's also partly because tariffs, people figure out ways to get around them or they substitute products and goods and things like that. And one of the other bad things, and I'm sorry for cutting you off, one of the other bad things that happens is if you're in a protectionist marketplace, as a producer, you tend not to be as competitive because you know that the government or that nobody can compete with you, so you have less competition. The classic case of

this was the- The auto industry in the 70s? Yeah. I was going to say the big three or big two and a half auto manufacturers, where there were heavy tariffs on imported cars, both high-end and low-end. And this stuff never really affects the high-end because people who are buying high-end products can pay more if they want. But it wasn't simply that the U.S. auto companies were caught by surprise when tariffs started to decline, but it was also that they had baked into their production processes

and their design processes and their labor contracts just so much inefficiency because they didn't have to work that hard for sales. Yeah. I remember my father, when he first got a Toyota, it was a revelation to him. He was like, I can't believe it. If this is an American car, the window thing, the window regulator would be falling off by now and the armrest would be falling off.

And he says, look, the door is closed properly. He couldn't believe that you could make a car like this. And then sure enough, the American cars got much, much better. Yeah. Yeah. And, and also, you know, the other thing is worth thinking about is like, what, what is an American car? Because a lot of it is, you know, part of it is built overseas or in Canada or Mexico. But here's my question. I could imagine that the delta, as they say,

between producing an identical product in China and America where wages are so much lower, everything is just cheaper, cheaper. It could be profoundly different. It could cost them 30% of what it costs an American company to make it. Think about like with avocados in Mexico. They're so cheap. It's cheaper to import avocados from Mexico and ship them to New York

than to grow them in Florida or California. So it's much, much cheaper in China. And then I don't really know if China has a free market such that there's competition between two companies in China making that item. So then they can raise the price just a little bit below what the American guy can make it at. And we have our unions and all like that. And then they make a killing. The Chinese company makes a killing. Actually, it's not all passed on.

Some small or some percentage of it is passed on to the American consumer. But a huge part of it is going in the pocket of a Chinese businessman. And I think I know the answer to this, but I'm asking it also because this is how people are trying to understand this question. And what is wrong with us saying, well, you know what? We're going to take a chunk of that money. Who's we? The American government. We're going to get revenue from that. Yeah. And then what are they going to do with that revenue? I mean, so if you're a consumer,

I don't- Service the deficit? Yeah. With that, they're increasing because we're spending $7.2 trillion instead of $4.4 trillion or $2 trillion or whatever. But is there something to that? I mean, the idea is that you will raise, you know, and I'm trying to remember now what the estimates are on this round of, you know, of goods. Like say it's, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars a year. That one, it may not end up being that much. Oftentimes these things are over, the estimates are overly

generous. Every time somebody says, I'm raising a tax or I'm cutting a tax, it's going to, you know, they always oversell it for whatever reason. But then, you know, the idea that the U.S. government knows better what to do with money that they take from American consumers. I agree with you on that. That's, you know, that's tough. And the idea was we're going to use tariffs to pay for the tax cuts, the extension of the Trump and Republican tax cuts that got passed in 2017 or 18. And that remains to be seen because you could tariff everything and you're not going to get enough money to make up for the costs of those other tax cuts and i like tax cuts i think we

you know i think we we pay too much in taxes and we spend too much but i also think that we need to pay for the government that we're actually having uh and this is one of the things that happened. Really, it started in its modern form under George W. Bush, who inherited a balanced budget. And it was a balanced budget that had been balanced by Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress. And then they blew out everything by just borrowing wildly. That continued under Obama. It continued under Trump 1.0.

It continued under Bush, or Biden, rather. And it's probably going to continue under Trump in a second term. So it's not like we're taking any of this new revenue and actually using it to retire the debt or to really cut taxes in a way that is sustainable. Have you thought about if you were emperor and you could reshape the budget as you wish and without causing any more hardship than you wish to cause whatever healthcare you

want to give, whatever social security you want to give, how much smaller you think you could make the budget? Yeah. I mean, you know, this is me kind of already giving up. But to say, you know what, maybe we should be able to go back to the 2019 level. That's before COVID, right? So, okay, you know. And we all know.

Why not 1992 level? Yeah, no, no. Control for inflation. Yeah. too low. Yeah, no, no. I'm just saying as an easy thing to say, like, you know, it shouldn't be that hard to go from, you know, back to $4.4 trillion as a starting point and then cutting, you know, or stopping growth and have us grow. If we grow the economy, you know, whatever we're spending as government is less. For me, the big things and the big drivers of spending at this point, and something like 75% of the budget, I started writing about federal budget issues in the early

2000s. And this is already boring me, so I apologize for this. But back then, you would talk about, well, she's thinking about Philip Roth. And I want to get back to that. But, you know, you would always say something like, you know, the federal government has two parts to it. It's called discretionary spending and mandatory spending, each of which takes up about 50% of the budget. That's like what you would say circa 2002. Now, and that means mandatory spending is stuff that doesn't have to get re-upped every year. So that's like Social Security and Medicare.

And it's indexed to inflation often. Yeah, in various ways. But that is on autopilot. And then discretionary spending is stuff like defense and education, which technically has to get renewed every year. And Congress actually has to fucking do something, which they never do, and they didn't this year. But now it's three quarters mandatory spending.

And it's a quarter discretionary spending. So it's like, because Social Security, Medicare in particular, which the old age entitlements, they keep growing even as the amount of money that is taxed to fund them just doesn't keep pace. So for me, that would be like the primary if I'm emperor, and you would have to be emperor because anybody who does this is probably going to get voted out of office pretty quickly. But we have to tackle that. And you know, Noam, you and I are of a certain age where we're

nearing, you know, the official retirement ages. And, you know, it's wrong for people like us who have the means and the money and the ability to pay for our retirements and to pay for our health care to make somebody's grandkids, you know, younger and poorer people pay for that on the idea that, oh, when you retire, you know, in 50 years, it'll be there for you. Because it won't be. I mean, it just can't. We have too many people retiring with too few contributors. And it's a shitty deal. Like, Social Security is, you know, it's not just that it picks the pocket of younger workers to pay for older workers. It is a bad kind of guaranteed retirement plan. You would be much better off saving that money and putting

it in a mutual fund and just letting it ride for 30 years. That's what Bush wanted to do. Kind of. He screwed that up. It's a real shame. I mean, George W. Bush, it's hard to remember how unpopular he was and kind of how bad he was at everything other than blundering into really shitty wars. And it's worth remembering that because he seems kind of like a nice guy now, as does Obama, who also made a lot of really bad mistakes, whereas Trump and Biden and Hillary Clinton, they're more villainous, right? But yeah, Bush, when he won re-election in 2004, by really amping up the idea that we were about to be destroyed by Islamic terrorism and all of that, he said, I'm going to – I have a lot of political capital and I'm going to use it to fix immigration and Social Security. And he had decent plans for the beginning of that, but he was just not the guy to do it. Now, what are the odds that, you know,

I'm looking at these flat screen TVs. I remember when they first came out, they were like $10,000, $12,000. Now they're almost a couple hundred dollars, right? Yeah, that's probably, it's a Vizio. So you could get that at Walmart. That's probably like 200 bucks. Yeah.

So what are the odds that when all these pressures finally come to the breaking point, that technology will so decrease the costs of various things like health care, maybe housing will come down, more housing, that we'll have a much softer landing than you would imagine if everything was straight line projections based on what we have now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you know, that, I mean, I kind of believe in the singularity, you know, the idea that eventually machines and computers will start talking to each other. And, you know, and I like AI. I mean, I think we have, you know, the- We replaced 20% of the workforce, the federal workforce, now with AI, by the way.

Yeah, and I mean, of course, you know, none of these things, I mean, you don't want doctors deciding like, of workforce now with ai by the way yeah and i mean of course you know none of these things you i mean you you don't want doctors deciding like okay i'm checking the ai and it's said okay i'm going to cut off this leg you know or whatever or i'm going to deport these people because in auto complete in an auto complete field it's like you know the name dworman came up like your ms-13 obviously i can see from he wears those long sleeves to hide the tattoos. I'm MS-18. It's a Jewish joke.

Go ahead. And, you know, so I don't believe in apocalypse. Like, you know, things are never as bad as they seem. I remember after 9-11 and everybody was talking about dirty bombs, and it's like somebody could walk into Times Square with a fleece, as they used to call them, and a suitcase-sized bomb, and it's detonated. And then when you read what people said, okay, this is actually what would happen, you would have to, if you were exposed to it, go inside, take a shower,

and keep your blinds closed. Because the amount of radiation that even a dirty bomb would give off was like, you know, it's like getting a suntan. I mean, it was like, God, this is kind of amazing. And when you look at this century, we've had so many terrible things thrown at us, you know, including, you know, COVID and the financial crisis and 9-11. And it's like we're doing pretty well, actually, in a lot of ways. So I don't believe in apocalypse, but it is true that the government is a primary cause of volatility and uncertainty in the economy and in our everyday lives. And it behooves us really to figure out how are we going to address entitlement issues? How are we going to address entitlement

issues? How are we going to make it easier for people to get housing, whether they're renting or owning? And you know, how do we unleash market forces that have made this, you know, TV super great and cheap? How do we bring that to healthcare and education and every other thing that we care about? And of course, government keeps the prices high through all their... Yeah, yeah. So Trump, I want to get your take on... Do you know what I said about Anthony Weiner as a New Yorker, as a gain-of-function New Yorker?

So that was Donald Trump, right? He's a cartoon version. I think he's worse than those of us who were not Trump apocalypse predictors thought he would be. Are you moving to Canada with all of the Yale faculty? No. We really don't know how it's all going to play out.

My daughter's in eighth grade, and quite often the entire administration, not often, always, of a previous president gets reduced down to three or four bullet points that she has to memorize. And it's interesting because you could imagine, there's so many things every day. There's this story, there's that story, there's this guy who's deported by mistake. And you wonder, okay, but when it's all said and done and we're 10 years down the line, what will be the bullet points? And will those bullet points make it all worthwhile, better than the Kamala Harris bullet points would have been? I mean, I think so.

Let's speculate what those bullet points would be. So, you know, Trump, his first term bullet points would have been pretty good. Very good. I like it where it's like, you know, he brokered the Abraham Accords. He oversaw a growing economy. have been pretty good. I like it where it's like, you know, he brokered the Abraham Accords. He oversaw a growing economy. The Trump Court got rid of racial preferences. Yeah. He supercharged, you know, the COVID vaccine production and stuff like that. Yeah, he doesn't want to admit that, but I don't know. That's a really interesting question. But that's really the heart of the

matter. Otherwise, you get caught up in the hysterics of all of it. And they're valid. I mean, the idea that somebody... Now, I read into it yesterday for the first time, and I realized, oh, well, this guy actually might have been... It actually looks like this guy was a gang member, but that really doesn't matter. It doesn't.

It doesn't matter to the principle of government by shitshow. And if this guy... If they got lucky enough that this guy actually deserved it, that does not sanitize the procedure as being reckless and a violation of his liberties, even if he's guilty. Yeah, I mean, and he did have a valid order where he could not be deported. Yeah. And people can argue about that. But that's also— Procedure is everything. Yeah. And taking a step back, the rhetoric that, oh, we are undergoing an invasion by MS-13 and by Mexicans and by Indians

and by people who want to come here and live here, that's wrong. There isn't a crime wave associated with immigration. The reason we have more illegal immigration than legal immigration at times is because it's impossible to move here legally i mean we i i we definitely want to get gang members out yeah of course absolutely and we want the border to be secured which you know uh trump and actually biden in his last six months was doing you know this is this is all to the good. And so I'm not apocalyptic about Trump, but, you know, this is one of the benefits and maybe this is also one of the limits

of being a libertarian. Like I, you know, every president, it is this mix of things where it's like, you know, George W. Bush was not completely terrible, but he was terrible on civil liberties. He was terrible on foreign policy. He was terrible on spending liberties he was terrible on foreign policy he was terrible on spending you know things like that you know Obama not terrible on everything but he was he was worse than Bush in a lot of ways and and you know Trump was worse than Obama in a lot of ways and

Biden was worse than Trump so it's kind of a perpetual cycle and I don't think one of the things that bugs me is the idea that, you know, we're not supposed to be critical of the president. You know, this drives me nuts. Or Anthony Weiner. Yeah. Well, yeah, you know. Well, I don't have to vote for Anthony Weiner. And I don't have to live under his, you know, heel.

Under his boot. What about under his boot? Yeah. What about even on Ukraine, I'm optimistic that the outcome with Trump will be better than it would have been under Harris, which just seemed to be a policy that was just floating in the wind. It had no goal. Right. I mean, I worry, um, you know, with Trump and foreign policy, uh, and this is saying a lot because we're coming off of a quarter century of just terrible foreign policy. And I guess he was involved in some of that. It's not clear, you know, people may remember that during the Bush years, people like, it was a big gotcha question.

Like whenever anybody was on a talk show, they'd always be like, well, do you agree with the Bush doctrine? And people would be like, yes, I do. And then like, well, what is it? And nobody could define it even though he was like launching major wars. It was a Charles Krauthammer term, I think, the Bush doctrine. Yeah, and it was like – it wasn't clear. And I can remember reading articles where like actually there's Doctrines and all of this type of stuff. But it's good to have basic principles that are thought through, that candidate but was perceived as such and did nothing to change that thinking.

And then he was kind of a warmonger when he was in office. And then Trump, it's not clear what is his governing principles because there's something sickening when he's telling a country that was invaded, you know, that you are the problem, and that, you know, if you don't kiss my ass right now, like, I'm going to say, you know, go straight ahead, you know, Putin, and go in. Having said, you know, and then his position on Israel is different, and it's kind of obscure, and, you know, but what is Trump's, you know, set of basic coordinates that he uses to determine foreign policy?

It's not clear. Do you find that... But just to agree with you, I mean, you know, it's better, I think it's better than Biden, you know, where whatever Biden was doing, he was spending a lot, but then also telling people you could do this, but not this. And like he was simultaneously,

you know, giving a lot of money and micromanaging or being kind of vacant. So, yeah. And I mean, bogged down it, but obviously there were certain kind of optimism early on in the war that,

you know, they might just do this and maybe the prognosis is going to get rid of Putin or maybe he has pancreatic cancer. So there was reasons, but I don't think anybody thinks that Ukraine is going to expel Russia from the Donbass anymore.

And if that's the case, then time may be on Russia's side. If they dick around for another two years, Russia might roll into Kiev. And I think we all breathe a sigh of relief to hear Trump actually say out loud that he's pissed off at Vladimir Putin. We hope you try to divine

where Trump's coming from. I'm much, much more off-put and scared of J.D. Vance and this post- Trump MAGA motley crew of nuts. I see them as nuts, people who praise Alex Jones and whatever it is.

And Trump's 78 years old. It's not like crazy to think Vance could be president even in this term. How do you feel about this guy? You know, you had mentioned earlier on that you don't like Elon Musk, right? I have a better opinion of Musk than I do of Vance. Yeah, well, what I was going to say that, you know, it's interesting, and I think, you know, the Doge project is a good idea, and I don't like the way it's being executed. And my colleague, Matt Welch, has talked about this in other contexts of, you know, when something gets going,

like, you don't have the ability to try a bunch of different things to see what works, like in terms of cutting government or whatever, like, the moment happens. And then like, if you know, your first cut is probably going to be what you get, like your first take. And I think they're doing it wrong in a way that's going to discredit the idea of like cutting government for a long time. And that bothers me a lot. But on another level, you know, within Trump world, Elon Musk does, you know, he earlier, or I guess late last year and earlier this year, he was talking about being in favor of high wage or high skilled immigration, and that he would fight the MAGA people, including JD Vance on that. And Bannon.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it worries me because, you know, everybody, there's a flurry of stories and I suspect there's some truth to it that he's going to be leaving the White House, you know, or the sphere of influence pretty soon. And if Trump becomes fully just MAGA all the way and there is no kind of people on there who are saying, you know what, maybe we need to be more economically minded. Maybe we need to be thinking about immigration and pulling back from the strict MAGA world. I think that's very disturbing. Scares the shit out of me.

By the way, Trump has always been for these H-1B visas. This is an issue that he championed in 2015. I remember hearing him arguing with Bannon about it. And one thing about Trump, he doesn't change his positions that easily. So I think he'll stick by it. But this may be one of the last things we'll talk about. The new respect that all these conspiracy theorists have in that world, that Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones and whoever else there is,

seem to have the president's ear, and they have Vance's ear, and then Kash Patel and all these various knucklehead appointees. Matt Gaetz, who didn't... They got to be pissed right now. Now, you might be a fan of Tulsi Gabbard. I don't know, because I know you have some... I'm fixed. Yeah, no, you know...

But to me, she's a flake. Even if I agree with her on some things, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's odd, because she... You know, everybody's a critic of the deep state. And then when you start running it, you start to find reasons to keep it or to do certain things and all that. But yeah, I share your concerns about a lot of this stuff

because the conspiracy theory world, and there's a left-wing version of it, but it's not in power right now. It's disturbing because I don't know how you engage. It mixes with Ukraine because, all right, Trump seems to want to impose a settlement kind of in a common sense way, where Vance hates Zelensky.

He hates him because the guy's done something wrong. The guy never done anything wrong. He was invaded, right? And then if you look at his ideological cousins, they clearly hate Vance because he's Jewish. Yeah, Zelensky. I mean, Zelensky because he's Jewish. Yeah, Zelensky. Zelensky because he's Jewish. They come out and say it. And then there's the

classic trope of where Zelensky's Jewish and he's really a Nazi. Yes. He's a Bolshevik, they call him. That's right. And Tucker Carlson will talk about him rat-like and sweaty, and then Glenn Greenwald will talk about how

our support for Ukraine is really about Israel. So this is all very ominous to me. I kind of trust Trump on this stuff. Why in the world do they hate Zelensky like this? It's psychotic. They hate him. I don't know. I don't understand that. How could he have pleased them by just rolling over and let the Russians in? Yeah, and this is the whole, you know, thing too, is that like, it's one thing to be against America, you know, giving aid, much less troops or anything, to Ukraine. That's on us, not on Zelensky. Yeah, and I mean, he's asking for, you asking for help and things like that. And I think he's made mistakes and all of that. But it's a very strange position where you're basically arguing that this guy who really rose to the occasion.

I mean, regardless of ideology in a lot of ways, because Yeltsin was like this, too, where he rose to his moment in history and then couldn't sustain it. And we have reverberations of that, but it's kind of amazing. And when Zelensky, what is the equivalent? George Lopez? Or somebody like a sitcom comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, becoming a meaningful leader. It's very strange. What was that Russian comic's name? Oh, Yakov Smirnoff. Yeah, who has a very good podcast now. Does he?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if he's still there or if he does it from there, but he moved to Branson, Missouri and had a regular show there. He's very patriotic American, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that published the magazine, actually gave him an award sometime in like the 80s or very early

90s. And that is a... I don't know where he is on, you know, the Ukraine Russia split. Because you never know, you know, when people who left the Soviet Union they have odd allegiances. Now before we go, because

I'm always feuding with dave smith yeah who is supposedly a libertarian yeah can you explain the split between the gillespie wing and the smith wing of the libertarian movement yeah that's a good question because i agree with you guys so much and I think everything they say is out to lunch. You know, without going into details too much, part of it is the difference between somebody like Friedrich Hayek as a thinker or an organizing principal and Murray Rothbard is very influential at the groups that Dave, you know, is particularly at home with, like the Mises Institute. And Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist, and he threw a lot of complicated kind of thinking about stuff. He's an anarcho-capitalist, but then ended up rolling for a time with David Duke, or, you know, being very interested in the kind of populist right in the, you know, years ago. And then, I mean, Rothbard's been dead for a while, but his followers are kind of interested in that. And, you know, and that immigration is somehow,

you know, we shouldn't have any government, but we should have like a really strict border until all property is privately owned. And there's, to put it more bluntly, and I don't mean this pejoratively, like I mean this descriptively, but I think part of it is also it's dispositional. And a lot of libertarians like are, I hate to use the word cosmopolitan, because that gets used as an invective against me. But, you know, some people like living in kind of sloppy, heterodox places where all sorts of weird shit and weird people happen. Right. And, you know, and it's, you know, it's and and then some people don't. Some people like living in, you know, more hierarchical and more monocultural places,

and that could be ethnically, it could be class, it could be all sorts of things, or people who believe the same thing. And that's a big split in the broad libertarian movement. Okay, but so just like, if you're about liberty, and liberty is um moves you your your heart uh um is it swells to the what the sultry strains of liberty whatever um then ukraine you would think would be something that you would support here is a country about to be overrun by a tyrannical dictator, and they're fighting for their freedom. They may not be a perfect democracy, but certainly their future is brighter under a Ukrainian government than it is going to be. But their instinct is vehemently in the other direction. What's going on here?

Why would a libertarian movement ever speak this way about a people fighting for their freedom? Yeah, I don't understand that. And again, I'm not committed to American troops being in Ukraine. And I think we need a good accounting of all the aid that we give. And in general, I'm against foreign aid. But yeah, when you look at the optics of the picture where there's a David and a Goliath, you would think that most libertarians are always going to be on the side of the David. And that matters. And it's also, Tucker Carlson went through a libertarian phase. I mean, he was an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in D.C. shortly before he formed the Daily Caller. And I have an old, I used to do a Reason talk show with Michael Moynihan when he worked at Reason.

And we had an episode where Tucker was on and he was talking in ways it's like you would not recognize the same person because he was, you know, anti-government and he was uh yeah he was very libertarian and you know to see him going to russia and doing a kind of you know reverse minstrel show of paul robson or like you know a black leftist in stalin's moscow you know and talk about how great the supermarkets are and the subways and all of that it's very peculiar um and i think some of it is and again I don't know that this is you know particularly libertarian but there's you know people some people like tradition and hierarchy and like clarity in social relations you know a man is a man and a woman is a woman and we don't you know and gays are problematic because they don't you know they they don't fit into categories and things like that. And then other

people are like, you know, whatever, you know, do whatever you want and, you know, as long as you're not hurting somebody. And they have this urge. Now, of course, it's always very, very hard. It's the unanswerable question in a certain way, how to trade off between actual

lives dying and that it's, that it was worth it for those lives to be lost in order to um fight for a certain way of life yeah to is it is it better to have them be slaves or is it better to support the war where 30 000 innocent people will die but will end slavery these are you very, very tough questions, right? But you would think that the libertarians somehow would have a tougher time with that question because they value liberty.

And then of course, there seems to be, I don't see the libertarianism at all in what they're saying. And then just my pet peeve is if this notion that let's say you accept all their arguments that Putin was provoked by whatever nonsense there is, an offhand comment by Baker, whatever it is, and to the extent that you think that the non-pretextual part of his concerns about whatever's going on in Ukraine and provocations from ethnic Russians, whatever it is. So he was provoked, and therefore he had no choice but to go into Ukraine, and now he should be entitled to keep 20% of the country.

Okay, fine. So that's your kind of principles. Okay, now let's take those principles and use them to examine another chapter. Let's look at the 1967 situation that Israel was in. Egypt puts 100,000 troops on the borders, removes the UN peacekeepers, has a blockade, has genocidal rhetoric. Israel is provoked. They take out the Egyptian army. They didn't, and then Jordan attacks. That's more than provoked. And they take this land.

These same people say, no, not one square inch should Israel be able to keep. Not one inch. I don't care if you were provoked. Or they'll say, you weren't provoked. You had a choice. They'll say, of course they had a choice they had less of a choice than putin did right so unless there's something i'm missing or

i'm being unfair which you know i don't like to be yeah i'm calling bullshit on the whole point of view yeah well you know i uh and i'm yet to hear someone push back on me and say, this is what you're missing, Noam. Well, I'm not, you know, I, you know, my libertarianism, I think is, you know, is pretty open and forthright. Yeah. So, I mean, I... You stand for what I stand for. You want to... And, I mean, I said in a conversation with the people we're going to have dinner with,. Everybody's entitled to due process. Even if, in my opinion,

even if it's not a constitutional requirement, it's basic fairness and morality that people should be treated fairly when they can be. People should not suffer consequences without some procedure that allows them to state their case. Like, I don't have to give my employees due process. I can say to my employee, you know what? I think you were stealing.

You're out. But I don't do that. I say, listen, I think you were stealing. What do you have to say for yourself? Well, listen to here. Here's a witness. I embark on that because it's... Well, it's...

So these immigrants, he doesn't deserve due process. He's here legally. It's much worse, too. I mean, business owners are one thing, but when it's the government, they have ostensibly a monopoly on force. So they're held to a higher standard because you can fire somebody that can get a job somewhere else if you're running the government and you put somebody away or do the same thing. I don't think businesses should have the requirement. I'm saying, but when, when it's not too onerous a burden on me, I will reserve the right to say, listen, I don't trust it. You got to go. Well, you know, here, but this is where I really,

the libertarian point of view in general really moves me because it's, it's, it's a respect for people and for fairness and for freedom in a way. Yeah. Well, I think- Wherever you can find it. One of the, you know, kind of paradoxes of the current moment or, you know, certainly of the past 25 years, I'm really starting to see, you know, the 21st century, like it's worth talking about it because a lot of negative trends accelerated, some positive things accelerated during it. But, you know, this concept that we've lost so much trust and confidence in

government, and I think we've done that rightly because government has acted poorly. You know, they, you know, in the first Gulf, or not the first Gulf War, in the Iraq War, and, you know, throughout the war on terror, our government just lied to us. They lied about what they were doing, and they also lied about how much it would cost and how they were spending money. You know, they lied about the financial crisis, the causes of it, and the remedies to it. They lied about COVID in all sorts of ways and made a lot of, you know, we have every reason to have less trust and confidence in government. And from a libertarian perspective, superficially, that's like a good thing, because once people don't trust the government, they're going to, you know, say we want less of it. but that isn't the way it works and ironically and i wrote a story about this a few

years ago in reason which was you know semi-controversial within libertarian circles whereas saying you know we've won that idea that argument of the idea that you shouldn't trust the government because it is incompetent at best and kind of malevolent at worst. But that doesn't lead to less government. It actually leads predictably around the world to people wanting more like a strong man or strong governments that can stop the chaos. And I feel like this is what's happening under Trump. You know, he came in and he said, I'm going to destroy the deep state. I'm going to get rid of all of these administrative bureaucrats who are just doing whatever they want without any restraint.

And he's modeling that now in a lot of ways. And so you're not going to change direction by doing more and better of what you're combating. And ironically, I think, you know, libertarians would do well in this. I'm in a minority position in the libertarian movement because I'm not an anarchist in this sense. But like, we need to, you know, show where government legitimately has an interest and how it can be effective and efficient. And I actually think once people understand that can happen, they will vote, you know, they'll vote for less government. This happened in the 90s, throughout the 90s at the state and federal level. As the government started doing less things, and it did them more effectively, you know, the burden of

government shifted. So, you know, we have a lot of work to do. Trump is a shame, right? Because he came into office now, and's got such a uh cult-like power yeah that he could have literally chosen you know any subtle direction to go in um and the country would have come along it also remains to be seen you're right that he is remarkably consistent in many of his beliefs i mean he changes them because like when he first ran he was anti-bitcoin and now he's kind of like pro-Bitcoin and certainly crypto, etc. Those are not his deeply held beliefs. Yeah. But you're right that he's pretty predictable. But the other thing to remember,

you know, it's weird because this is his second term. So he's kind of a lame duck already. But then, you know, as he approaches the midterms, he's going to be very lame duck. But I was going to say, you know, when you look at somebody like Ronald Reagan, at this point in his first term, he was a complete disaster. Like, you know, he got what he wanted and things went really poorly. And then by, you know, by 1984, he was about to win 49 states and probably 50. I think, you know, they gave him think they gave Walter Mondale Minnesota so he wasn't completely humiliated. So things can change pretty quickly. And Trump is probably adaptable. And as the tariffs go into place and if the economy tanks, he can't live with that.

No. And he'll start to change that. I agree with you. More than anything, he wants to be popular. And actually, I think he wants the country to do well. Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't, you know, people have this horrible impression of the guy. I think he's more complicated than that, but I don't think he is.

Or, and it's not, I mean, all, you know, I think Biden, you know, to the extent that he had anything going on at the end, like he didn't want to leave office being a bum. Right. You know, and it's an interesting point. I hope somebody close to Trump is saying, like, what are the three bullet points you want people to remember? And it's not going to be I deported a bunch of, you know, guys who hung out at Home Depot parking lots like it's going to be that. You know, they all want the country to do well. But I think the country, a picture of a country doing well, according to Donald Trump,

in many ways would be closer to what you and I would think of than what Joe Biden, who knows what a left-wing democratic vision of the country doing well is. It's certainly not, I don't even know if business even occurs to them or free press even occurs, free speech occurs to them.

Yeah, I mean, Trump on free speech is really incredibly bad. You know, and he had an executive order that was great where he basically said, you know, this Biden era jawboning of social media and actually leaning on people, that's done, which is good. But then he's, you know, going after people for all sorts of things. And he has an FCC chief who is going after networks and programs for the way they edit videos.

And this is insanity. The way they edit videos about him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In an ironic, listen, the guy is so thin-skinned, and he makes a fool of himself. Yeah. But I don't see any anti-free speech movement coming out of his movement. They're the free speech people, even if he's a disgraceful guy.

And I don't like the way they're going after the universe. I'm sure we agree. Yeah. And it's one thing to cut- Let the people protest for Hamas. Yeah. I'm sure we agree. Yeah, you know, and it's one thing to cut. Let the people protest for Hamas. Yeah, it's one thing to cut, you know, money, and it's one thing to cut, you know, even funding for research because there are ways around that.

But to, you know, be going after people because of the things they say, that's, I mean, profoundly un-American. I hope that Donald Trump. Trump judges will be much more good, good story. Is it for what they're saying, or are they falling under things like inciting violence or harassing people? I don't know. I mean, it's... I don't trust anything they say. Yeah, and the idea... Well, it's not what they're saying. I mean, it's what... I don't trust anything the Trump administration says. Yeah. Sure. You know, students, like, I don't think writing editorials in a student newspaper is an incitement to violence. No. This is the problem.

It's just like the pardons. I'm totally persuadable about almost anything. Be a professional. Write a document. Present it to the American people. This guy is pardoned for this, this, and this reason. This person is being deported. He did this, this, and that. Have it ready

to present to the people at the time you're deporting them. Sure. Yeah. But they don't do that. They put the cart before the horse and throw them out. In a way, I mean, why I, hopefully this will be the legacy of Donald Trump is that

he will have made, if he makes America more like New York, I think that would be a good thing because what's great about New York everybody disagrees and you know there's a ton of different types of people living different kinds of lives here and it all kind of works and like to me that's my vision of America it is you know it is like the you know it is the Lower East Side. It is Greenwich Village. It's Hell's Kitchen. And it's just people doing what they want to do to make their lives interesting and express themselves and make money. And in a way, you're right.

I think Trump understands that kind of on a cellular level, even if he doesn't know how to articulate it and often works against that. And I think a lot of the people around him don't share that. They're very uncomfortable with that kind of thriving hub of just weirdness, of individualism and weirdness. And that worries me. We've got to go. Are you coming to take a cab with me? I guess I have to.

You don't have to. Thank you very much as always. Nick Gillespie, Reason Magazine. Free minds and free markets and free everything. Bye, everybody. Free sex. Free mumia.